Architects, builders, and real estate developers have been building physical representations (models) of their design concepts for centuries to help them both develop their design and communicate that design to their clients. These models typically involve the fabrication of a building model (typically a residential house or commercial building), the fabrication of a site model of the property's terrain, and the placement of miniature facsimile trees and/or shrubs on the site model.
The building model is a scaled three dimensional model that represents the architect's design of the proposed building. These building models have traditionally been fabricated by hand using cardboard-type materials (“chipboard” is a popular medium) by architects and/or model builders using X-ACTO® knives and glue to manufacture a miniature scaled model of the building design. Other materials can also be used such as plastics or metals, which are often cut to size using laser cutters.
The site models are typically scaled topographical representations of the land on which the building is to be constructed. The typical approach to constructing these site models is to cut out and stack-up cardboard layers, with each cut out layer representing a land elevation contour.
Once the building model and site model have been integrated together to form a combined model, the final assembly stage of the combined model is the placement of miniature foliage representing trees and/or shrubs. The miniature foliage may be simply decorative (i.e., randomly place on the site model with no correlation to the actual location of plants), or it may be a representation of the actual positioning of foliage that is intended to occupy the site with the building as part of an architect's landscape design.
In situations where the placement of foliage items on the site model needs to reflect the actual foliage existing on the property, the traditional approach has been to send a survey team to go to visit the property and survey each foliage element for location, type, trunk diameter and possibly height. This approach, although highly accurate, is time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive.
What is needed is a way of obtaining a reasonably accurate survey of the location, type, and size of foliage existing on a particular property without the delay and expense of an onsite survey by a survey team.